Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 357

Samuel Andreyev, The Relativistic Empire

RECURSION COOKIES
send knives down the phrase orkick cows to gel the steaks together
is a method forgetting near thepad and launch this mislaid thought
will pull leaves a part lacks butentry since keyhole’s crooked
entry since garnet looks bad iflanguage had snaps would attire be
scrapped as all must learn amodular nature stops cobbles
settling into stasis co-opts thearc of a wrist which would never tie
eyelets to the release hatch held by the mind or hand
some soap too past the timeto clean the knives
Canadian writer, composer and performer Samuel Andreyev’s second poetry collection, after Evidence (Toronto ON: Quattro Books, 2009), is The Relativistic Empire (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2015). His poems revel in the fragment, and a ‘serious play’ of shift and switch, composing collisions of sound and meaning that engage a more fluid semantics. As he writes in the poem “PUBLIC EXERCISE,” “semantic units / burst into view like colitis // with plastic tubs for sorting / strong misgivings       since the // ability to write is already apparent [.]” Composed in surreal bursts, the poems feel like exploratory missives, reaching out, and seeking to engage, with titles such as “A POSTCARD FROM BUSTER,” “START TO FORM A NEW OPINION,” “CAN I PLEASE JUST DINE IN PEACE” and “A SUREFIRE WAY TO END UP WITH NOTHING,” as well as three similarly structured poems titled “A PRIME LOCATION,” the second of which opens:
    time to count the peanutssplashing coffee against the wall sure feels good sometimesnever thought they’d agree butit was bound to happeni don’t know why
These are poems that react, question and comment, shifting both the familiar and the unfamiliar into their opposites. There are elements of the Canadian surreal in Andreyev’s poems, akin to works by Stuart Ross and others, but with more of an experimental, language-poetry bent, allowing for an intriguing, lively and playfully-compelling blend of structures that doesn’t often meet. The collection ends with the single poem “EXIT LINES,” immediately following the fifty-six section title sequence, that includes:
what’s happeningoutsidethe framethis developmenttakes severalyears agowe ate eggsthen startedto settlethe scumbetween crenellations

A ‘best of’ list of 2015 Canadian poetry books

Once again I’ve felt the need to put together another “best of” list of Canadian poetry books, which is now online over at the dusie blog (see prior lists here: 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011). Again, this is more of a “worth repeating” than a specific “best of,” it includes links to reviews (and a couple of author profiles) I’ve done for a variety of titles over the past year, including titles by Jake Kennedy, Stuart Ross, Ben Ladouceur, Oana Avasilichioai, Rita Wong, Pete Smith, Aaron Tucker, Pearl Pirie, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Liz Howard, Eva H.D., Damian Rogers, Dina Del Bucchia and Daniel Zomparelli, Shannon Maguire, Judith Fitzgerald, Phil Hall, Christian Bök, Daniel Scott Tysdal and Colin Browne.


One year I was even able to do a ‘best of’ list of Canadian poetry chapbooks , but I’ve been having a hard time over the past couple of years really getting Canadian chapbook publishers to mail me as much as I’d like to be seeing. Why is it always like pulling teeth?

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Robert Anderson

Robert Anderson's 44 page chapbook The Hospital Poems has recently been published by Bookthug.  His poetry has been published in such journals as Rampike, b after c, and House Organ.   His critical writing on poetry and art have been published in Canadian Art Magazine Online and the American webpage Fjords Review.   He is also an award winning art photographer who shown his work extensively in Toronto and has self published a collection of his art called The Other Side of There.  He is a volunteer archivist at The Psychiatric Survivors Archives of Toronto.

1 - How did your first chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I’m now dating Charlize Theron.  Other than that, life’s pretty much the same.  The red moon came and went.

I look at myself as following the trajectory of people like William Burroughs and Nicole Brossard.  I have my own style of writing.  I follow my own interests, sort of like life writing.  I want to see where it takes me.  I’m not one of those Death of the Authors type.  The Hospital Poems is now part of my past.  I have a lot of unpublished work. I write and live at my own expense.  Intention is another kind of ward. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
When I was a teenager, I think I always wrote poetry trying to impress some girl.  You could do that back in the 1970s.  It was a totally different era.  Now if you tell a girl you’re a poet, you might as well tell her you have herpes. 

As a teenager, I was very isolated and constantly in hospitals.  I use to listen to Bob Dylan albums nonstop.  I hated his music at first, but after I read his biography it all made sense to me.  Through Dylan I got interested in poetry.  It had the magic.  It had the mythic quality.  It was like having a dream that you couldn’t explain.  It was the life of Rimbaud. Poetry was the voice of the disenfranchised.  It had a vision and articulation you couldn’t find in other types of writing.  Poetry rebelled against what was fake and phony. 

Most recently, after having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for about 4 years and the frequent hospitalizations, writing poetry brought me back to being able to express myself, to write myself into some kind of life. 

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I think I’m like my former graduate English teacher Frank Davey.  He didn’t believe in inspiration as much as poetry being a work of construction.  I’ve always got a million things on my mind –whether poetry or art.  I never understood people in art college or writing classes who couldn’t think of something they want to do.  I write notes, lines as they come to me.  I don’t really do a lot of editing.  I love taking courses with the Toronto New School of Writing because it gives me an audience.  It helps focus my mind, which isn’t easy for me to do.  Everything in life always looks so far away to me.  I once heard Robert Creeley speak in person and he compared his method of writing to that of a baseball pitcher who gets on a roll and keeps throwing strikes.  That sounds good to me. 

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I always want to write a book.  That’s why I like my unpolished serial poem CODE 7.  I started at the beginning and wrote it in order to the end.  THE HOSPITAL POEMS is different.  It’s in a different order except for the last 5 poems or so are exactly the last 5 poems I wrote.  I’ve never put in for a grant so I don’t really feel the need to define the work before I begin.  The poems begin at Coffee Time with my handwriting them in a notebook.  I don’t think that’s really what you mean by the question, but I like to stay grounded.  The poem begins with what’s happening in my life at the moment. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
The very first reading I ever did was one Karl Jirgens put me in to celebrate the anniversary of Rampike and Open Letter .  That was great because all the readers were great poets.  Out in BC, a young lady I’ve gotten to know Shazia Hafiz Ramji has started a reading series.  That should be great because she’s very bright and a talented writer.  Here in Toronto, I really feel less and less apart of the reading scene.  I don’t really fit in with the younger crowd.  A lot of them seem to be more inspired by Jim Carrey than any poet I’ve read.  People go to the readings looking for laughs.  There are also some very pretentious readings going on.  The members of these groups seem to feel they’re the leaders of some new republic. 

I guess I long for the days of my old Atkinson College writing teacher Stanley Fefferman.  He studied at Naropa and was heavily influenced by Buddhism.  Stanley always brought a sense of dignity to the proceedings.  He also had the courage to follow his own direction in life. 

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
It’s interesting, but a lot of writers feel they don’t engage theory when they write.  But if you write with the belief that language can accurately represent realty, than that too is a theory.  It’s hard for someone like myself to be a naïve writer, especially going through the graduate English department at York University when I did.  I’m concerned with the correlation of thought/vision/expression and the discourse of language and literature.  The double world.  For myself, it’s how to live and write as an artist.  I think current theories for most writers are on how to join the Borg Collective. 

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The current role of the writer in Canada is to be a mouthpiece of the federal Liberals or NDP.  That’s what it seems like.  Finding tenured writing jobs at university also seems to be a preoccupation of today’s poets.  I don’t really see much else behind the writing.  Most writers today come from MFA programs, and they learn to write in a homogenized style and dream of winning a Griffin Award.  Becoming Poet laureate of Toronto gets you 10 thousand dollars and a Tim Horton’s gift card.  In today’s world, the literary establishment of Canada feels that literature should be like little league baseball:  everyone gets a turn a bat.  That’s great when you’re a kid or in high school, but it doesn’t interest me.  People living on the street are probably more interesting to me. 

I’m old enough to remember the star power of seeing people like Allen Ginsberg perform in New York City.  When I saw Ginsberg in the mid 1990’s in New York, he spoke about how the beat generation was all about freedom of expression and having tolerance for other people.  That certainly isn’t the poetry scene now.  Ginsberg also spoke about his hatred of political correctness and insisted it was started by the rightwing in America.  Now poetry is all about political correctness.  There’s a growing literary McCarthyism scene in Canada.  Everyday they demonized someone new on social media and call them a racist or misogynist or whatever they can think of.  Usually the poets who do this are wimpy little characters in person but on social media they’re filled with bravado. 

Allen Ginsberg, probably the most famous gay American when he was alive, always rejected being the grand marshal in the New York Gay Pride Parade.  He felt the parade made gay people look ridiculous.  Can you imagine a famous Canadian poet saying that today?  They’d be run out of the country. 

I think poetry should be part of the counter culture, which no longer seems to exist.  A poet should fight against the sanctioned writing industry that sucks the soul out of the writer.  A poet should conceal more than reveal.  I don’t think they belong on social media.  It’s about going your own way in life.   A new world is only a new mind -- William Carlos Williams. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Really Victor Coleman was the editor of THE HOSPITAL POEMS.  Nobody has more experience editing innovative poetry that Victor does from all his years at Coach House.  He made my work more readable and made it read like I intended it to be. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
To live outside the law you must be honest -- Bob Dylan.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to photography to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I really like merging my poetry with my art photography and, of course, my life.  I started out in photography wanting to be a photojournalist or a documentarian.  It’s in the last 10 years I think I’ve managed to merge the art and the writing.  I self-published a chapbook called The Other Side of There.  It’s basically about what I’ve gone through in the last number of years.  Some of it simply documents the time I’ve spent in the hospital.  I’m also doing a re-visioning of Diane Arbus’ famous serious of mental patients.  Like my poetry, it’s always ongoing, maybe never to be completed.  My art chapbook features some of my critical writing but probably in a more poetic form than a typical artist statement.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I don’t really have a writing routine or any other kind of routine.  I suffer from depression and every day seems like a struggle.  I’m not careerist and don’t do a very good job of promoting myself. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I’m often isolated and I don’t see much around me that inspires my work.  I tend to turn inward for inspiration, if it really exists.   I can’t write at home and I can’t write when I’m alone.  I always write when I’m around people.  What drives me seems totally different than what drives other poets I know.  The whip that’s keeping them alive doesn’t make me jump. 

I don’t know if I believe in “inspiration” in that sense.  It’s always there for me.  What stalls me is a sense of hopelessness.  I don’t really know if I’m reaching anyone with my work.  I like having an audience. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I’ll have to get back to you on that one when I figure out what a “home” is. 

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Well, this would bring me back to Dylan.  He had the alchemy of words and music.  Beyond that, I studied film back in the early 1980s at York University.  I was fortunate to have teachers who were really interested in the avant-garde and the alternative cinema.  You can’t help but be influenced by that work.  Art and threatre also has had a big impact on my work.  The plays of Sam Shepard and the visual arts had a large impact on my next book of poetry CODE 7.  I don’t think there’s ever been a better movie than Meshes of the Afternoon . 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
There’s two poets who wrote blurbs on the back of my chapbook.  One is Sandra Ridley.  I think she’s the best poet writing in Canada today.  She never gets the recognition she deserves because she doesn’t play the game you need to play to be recognized.  The other poet who wrote a blurb on my chapbook is Julie Joosten.  She’s a very important person to me, along with being a great poet.  She’s totally different than anyone else on the literary scene.  She has no ego, she’s totally brilliant and she’s very accepting of people.  She doesn’t have some self-important agenda. Both Sandra and Julie give great readings and they always seem to reach for higher ground. 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I always feel I should be doing more to help other people.  I do volunteer work at the Psychiatric Survivors Archives of Toronto and I feel it gives a dignity to people who have had really bad lives.  But I really like working with people.  I don’t have any desire to be a Facebook activist. 
   
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I never was one of those who dreamt about occupations.  Even when I was doing my MA in English I never thought of it as leading to a career.  I think it’s great when people become lawyers or doctors or whatever.  It just never felt real to me.  I think my experiences in life have defined me as an outsider.  When I was real young I wanted to be an undercover cop, like on The Mod Squad.  I didn’t want to have to get my haircut or wear a uniform. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
The late Eli Mandel, one of my former graduate English teachers and one of this countries great academics and poets, wrote a poem about being captured by the “terror” of poetry.  He included rock stars Hendrix and Joplin as being poets.  It’s really romanticizing creativity, but I like it.  I don’t think I chose to write poetry.  I think it chose me.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The Hospital Poems.  I really like myself.  Besides that, anything by Sandra Ridley is great.  I don’t see a lot of films.  I love the old avant-garde type films I use to see in film theory classes at York University.  In the commercial realm, I thought Inside Llewyn Davis was a great film for artists.  Most of the poets I know hated it.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Writing metaphors of invisibility.  Integrating my poetry and art.  Working on constructs and a way out.  Trying to figure out where I’ve been and where I’m going.   Coping in a world where people kill to dissect.  Rereading my long serial poem Code 7 to see if it works.  Writing Cuchulain back to life.   

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Gustave Morin, Clean Sails

rules were established. i evolved the seemingly arbitrary number of one hundred and elevenpoems out of a close reading of Nelson Ball’s annotations to bpNichol’s konfessions of an elizabethan fan dancer (first published by Bob Cobbing in 1967; later reprinted by Nelson Ball in 1973; and then further reprinted again in an annotated, deluxe edition in 2004 – it may very well be the most known book of typewriter poetry from canada? or is that spot reserved for Steve McCaffery’s carnivalpanels? it’s a toss up?) my wish was to write out a body of work with proportions epic enough to carry freight and punch above its weight but not so large as to prevent my meeting the challenge i set for myself. so i started hitting the keys, clacking my way out of the project, watching the poems slowly bubble up one at a time, initially the idea was that i would start and then work at some sort of breakneck speed to carry to completion the entire volume in one fell swoop, the way many a mystery novel had been written. this worked well enough at first, but as i wrote deeper and deeper into the book, newer texts continued to come off better than those which had gone before, and i realized with a kind of alarm how little i actually knew about a subject i’d pretended to know so much about for the past two decades. i had only a superficial understanding of the typewriter and of the typewriter poem itself, and, furthermore, no one really had this understanding any longer. the typewriter had been made to evaporate from our culture like a stain of breath upon a mirror. the problem was that patience and concentration were no longer qualities that anyone possessed. yet these were simultaneously what was most required to bring about excellent typewriter poems. so i spent the rest of the summer in a concerted effort teaching myself how to concentrate, how to be patient and how to meditate a poem into being out of nothingness. (“Konfessions of an Expanded Typewriter poet”)
In an incredibly thoughtful and articulate post-script to his new collection of concrete and visual poems Clean Sails (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2015), Windsor poet Gustave Morin provides an intriguing overview of his work as a “typewriter poet.” He writes: “i first sat down to a typewriter in an attempt to forge a typewriter poem back in 1990. at the time my head was newly aswim in all things concrete, and the typewriter poem had firmly established itself as a major corridor in this immense but largely ignored idiom.” Via the BookThug blog, Pearl Pirie has already offered her own take on the book:
Excuses. Don’t need no professional quality acrylics to render a clear thought. Given sand, duct tape, or typewriter and the mind which is devoted to expressing, pushes any means to the necessary degree. It is not the tool but the mind behind it. Playful, meticulous, and sober and with more commentary on politics than most verbal poetry dares or cares to do with minimalist “violence as ornament”. Eye-dazzle, yes, but not decorative and pleasant and easy as some poetry, nor arbitrarily shutting the reader out either.
The author of numerous chapbooks and full-length works including A Penny Dreadful (Vancouver, BC: Insomniac Press, 2003), Spaghetti Dreadful (Ubu Editions, 2003), The Etc BBQ (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2006), the etcetera barbecue (2006), rare sheet music (2010), a psychowestern(2010) and the elephant papers(2014), Morin has also had work appear in numerous anthologies including Detours: An Anthology of Poets from Windsor & Essex County (Kingville ON: Palimpsest, 2013), The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008 (Fantagraphics, 2012), Switch & Shift: New Canadian Writing (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2005), Pissing Ice: An Anthology of ‘New’ Canadian Poets (BookThug, 2004), and The Common Sky (Three Squares Press, 2003).
Subtitled “TYPEWRITER POEMS / FROM THE SUN / PARLOUR OF CANADA,” Clean Sails is, as the press release informs, “120 typewriter poems (and an exegisis) representing thousands of hours of typing – five years in the actual writing, after a 20-year private apprenticeship and period of incubation going back to 1990, when his formal experiments with concrete poetry began in earnest.” There is an element of Morin’s focus on working with the typewriter, which some would consider an obsolete tool, that is reminiscent of Calgary poet derek beaulieu’s ongoing letraset explorations in visual and concrete poetry. There is something uniquely compelling in watching just about anyone so deep in such a study, especially one focused on the manual typewriter, a tool that many even within concrete and poetry circles (with a small handful of exceptions) have moved beyond, and Morin’s results are playful, methodical and remarkably fresh. Through Morin’s detailed and complex pieces, he proves that there is still much to explore, even while acknowledging his many influences throughout. In an interview conducted by Mike Borkent, in the most recent issue of The Capilano Review [see my review of such here], Morin discusses his decision to pursue an ongoing work utilizing the typewriter:
Back in 1990 I had the choice to fall with aplomb into what I’m doing now or flop resignedly into a very prosaic learning curve around computers and their limited use. I opted to keep computers out of my work. Almost as a rule, there is no electricity employed in the basic construction of my poetry. Teensy weensy scraps of paper, glue, ink, razorblades, scissors, (manual) typewriters, occasional letraset, spray paint, liquid paper, etc. Everything I make is real. And by that I mean it has an actual referent in the world, a piece of paper somewhere housing all of the various coordinates. (I don’t even want to publish my work on the computer, though this seems a hardline harder and harder to maintain.) I don’t know why, but it seems important to point all of that out. Mainly because people can’t tell: “Oh, you made this on a computer?” they ask. And I’m forced to say “no. No computers in any of it.” And then it becomes a polemic (for them), which it isn’t (for me). These preferences and discriminations have been with me all along. Did I choose wisely? Often, I’m not sure. But that’s a bit of what I’m poised on: the brinksmanship of that severe divide. Born of a generation that was awash in computers, but long before their obnoxious wholesale domestication. Once upon a time, not too long ago, I had the choice of opting out. Anymore, that choice no longer exists. And the planet doesn’t seem to be better for it, in my opinion.

David James Miller, CANT

calper limns as peal—syncretic diction
a raise / collect as landscape figures
contingent grammar as—–ponic
sacral fragments / sloughcondensed
tracing / as cant arcs
After a couple of chapbooks to his credit, American poet, editor and publisher David James Miller’s first trade poetry collection is CANT (Black Radish Books, 2015). CANT is a curious collection of five sequences—“THE COLLECTS,” “AS SEQUENCE,” “WITHOUT WHICH,” “OR DISCOURSE” and “THE COLLECTS”—as well as a brief opening poem (above), each constructed out of extremely precise gestures, with each poem circling around a particular word, phrase or idea. What appeals, in part, is the subtlety in which he constructs these gestures; deceptively slight, yet forming a remarkably connected sequence of fragments. Miller circles through repeated gestures, pauses, breaks and halts to form a set of accumulations, each constructed into a set of whole poems out of their own suggestions, inferences and incompletions. There is something of Miller’s small gestures akin to the work of poets such as Toronto’s Mark Truscott, or even Ottawa’s Cameron Anstee, who both combine gesture and smallnesses in extremely dense poems, and yet, the stretched-out smallnesses of Miller’s poems extend across the entire collection, making this less a collection of gestures than a single, extended poem. Think of the pointillist elements of Seurat. These poems are about breath, and thought, and gesture, and require both a slowness and a rapt attention. The poem/section “AS SEQUENCE” opens with a single line on the page that reads: “sequence as : as was want—” and writes, further on:
—was want
& dust—


lit
presentof /

what recursionin
movement—

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Zelazo, Hajnoczky, MacLeod, Maguire, Mangold and Trivedi.

Anticipating the release next week of the eighth issue of Touch the Donkey (a small poetry journal), why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the seventh issue: Suzanne Zelazo, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold and Amish Trivedi.

Interviews with contributors to the first six issues, as well, remain online, including: Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel, Deborah Poe, Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming eighth issue features new writing by: Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price, a rawlings and Gil McElroy. And, once the new issue appears, watch the blog over the subsequent weeks and months for interviews with a variety of the issue's contributors!

And of course, copies of the first seven issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe?

We even have our own Facebook group. You know, it's a lot cheaper than going to the movies.

U of Alberta writers-in-residence interviews: Gary Geddes (1976-77)

For the sake of the fortieth anniversary of the writer-in-residence program (the longest lasting of its kind in Canada) at the University of Alberta, I have taken it upon myself to interview as many former University of Alberta writers-in-residence as possible [ see the ongoing list of writers here ]. See the link to the entire series of interviews (updating weekly) here.
Gary Geddes has written and edited forty-six books of poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction, criticism, translation and anthologies and won more than a dozen national and international literary awards, including the National Magazine Gold Award, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region), the Lt.-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence and the Gabriela Mistral Prize, awarded simultaneously by the Government of Chile to Octavio Paz, Vaclav Havel, Ernesto Cardenal, Rafael Alberti and Mario Benedetti. He lives on Thetis Island, BC, with his wife the novelist Ann Eriksson.
He was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta during the 1976-77 academic year.

Q: When you began your residency, you’d only been publishing books for a couple of years. Where did you feel you were in your writing? What did the opportunity mean to you?
A: An attempt to get rid of me in 1974 by the new chair of English at the University of Victoria—I’ll leave his motives to your imagination—prompted me to fight back. Then, when I’d won my case as a result of students marching on the administrative offices and letters of support arriving from writers and academics around the country, I resigned, not wanting to be associated with a colleague whose behaviour could be so toxic and dishonest. I was nearing completion of my doctoral thesis on Joseph Conrad for the University of Toronto and had published four books of poetry and edited two poetry anthologies for Oxford University Press, 20th-Century Poetry and Poetics and 15 Canadian Poets, both of which were already widely used as textbooks in universities and colleges. In that regard, I was fairly well launched as a writer and teacher, though quite unemployed.
I had a Canadian Council grant for the first year, during which I completed my thesis and published my fifth book of poems, but had no idea what to expect the following year. That’s when I received a communication from Stephen Scobie and Douglas Barbour asking if I’d like to be their writer-in-residence, taking up the mantle of W.O. Mitchell. Talk about serendipity. And luck. The great moral support of belief that such an offer provided buoyed me up immensely. I felt extremely welcome in the department and made a number of life-long friends amongst the students and faculty. This mutual admiration resulted in my being offered a fulltime teaching position in the department. I don’t know what prompted me to turn down such a generous offer, perhaps the sting of my recent divorce from UVic. However, I did jump at the opportunity to come back for a second year as a visiting assistant professor.
Two incidents I recall especially are the following. A graduate student by the name of Aritha Van Herk had written a novel called When Pigs Fly, which she asked me to read and to tell her whether I thought she should submit it to the M&S First Novel Competition. I read the ms. and liked much of it, but told her that it could use more work and that the title had already been made famous by P.G. Wodehouse. Aritha, wise as always, ignored my advice, submitted Judith to the competition and won the first prize of $5000. Another moment I recall with great amusement was telling Rudy Wiebe that when I got to be his age I planned to dwindle into prose too. This comment was made in connection with an ongoing, good-humoured debate between him and Robert Kroestch on the relative merits of these two genres. I don’t know if I’ve imagined this, but I seem to recall Rudy chasing me down the corridor of the Humanities Centre with a glass of cold water not intended for drinking purposes and my escaping avant le déluge behind the door in my office.
During those two years at U. of A., 1976 to1978, I wrote “ Sandra Lee Scheuer ,” which Al Purdy would describe as “the kind of poem most poets wait a lifetime for.” I also made a lot of progress on a long narrative poem about the Winnipeg Grenadiers and the Royal Rifles of Quebec, who became prisoners of war when defeated by the Japanese. Since I’d been working hard, no one in the department complained when I put a sign on my door, saying “Gone Fishing: in Hong Kong,” and disappeared for two weeks of research in the Crown Colony. This work would eventually be published by Oberon Press under the title Hong Kong Poems, win the National Magazine Gold Award and be presented on stage by Per Brask at the University of Winnipeg. I also worked with George Liang on a book of English translations of the work of Li Bai and Du Fu, called I Didn’t Notice the Mountains Growing Dark.
So, I am immensely grateful to the University of Alberta, especially the English Department, for their faith in me and willingness to take me under their very protective wing for two exciting and productive years.
Q: How does your experience there compare to other residencies you’ve done?
A: Each of my residencies has had its own unique qualities. The full-year term is often most memorable because you make a bigger investment of time, energy and emotion and come away with more memories and a deeper knowledge of and appreciation for the new community. This was especially valuable to me as a young writer. Now, I prefer shorter residencies of 3-4 months, as I am less keen to spend long periods away from family and the home-place. My recent four-month residency at the University of Missouri in St. Louis had a certain depth and weightiness, the more so because I also taught two courses as part of my contract, which meant I wrote little but made close contact with a couple of dozen students.
Q: Given the fact that you aren’t an Alberta writer, were you influenced at all by the landscape, or the writing or writers you interacted with while in Edmonton? What was your sense of the literary community?
A: Landscapes dominated my first two books, Rivers Inlet and Snakeroot, the coast and the prairies respectively, both of which left their mark on my psyche and senses during the teen and pre-teen years. I think of those times as my Wordsworthian period, a time of healing after my mother’s death when she was thirty-five and I was seven. So, the return to the prairies in Alberta brought back a lot of memories and gave me a chance to dig (literally and figuratively) deeper into the landscape, especially when I spent a week or so on a bone-dig near Brooks, helping to retrieve the fully articulated skeleton of a Centrasaurus, with its prominent nasal horn. This experience resulted in a poetic meditation called “The Dream Bed.”
My deepest involvement with the prairie literary community was with Saskatchewan writers, as a teacher at the Fort San residency, where I worked with Tim Lilburn, Bruce Rice, Paul Wilson and Jerry Rush, all of whom went on the write important work. During those years, I observed that there was no star system in the prairies, that the writers were mutually supportive, celebrating each other’s work and successes. I think this solidarity mirrored Saskatchewan politics. Some of this cooperative element spilled over into Alberta, where political and ethnic differences have sometimes had a tendency to divide rather than bring together. Writers like Myrna Kostash and Rudy Wiebe and Robert Kroetsch worked against this divisiveness, bringing us close together while creating their own unique work on the page. Kroetsch was not living in Alberta at the time, but his presence was felt by those of us who knew his poetry and fiction.
By 1976, my attention was turning more and more towards larger social and political realities. So, while landscape took second place in my writing, I was always conscious that it played a significant role in the lives of those historical figures I was writing about. While Mackenzie King complained that we had too much geography and not enough history, I have always found there is plenty of both, if you look carefully at the rich and ongoing trail of Indigenous peoples in this land.
Q: How did you engage with students during your residency? Were there any that stood out?
A: My work with students at U. of A. was exciting. In addition to meeting them individually in my office, I was able to arrange a session to accommodate the overflow once a week in the evening. The one-on-one exchanges were the most satisfying, but the group session provided a different and exciting dynamic, especially as they included people like John Barton, Stephen Hume and George Liang.
John Barton has gone on to do important cultural work, as a fine poet and now as editor of The Malahat Review. Stephen Hume, who did not need any advice at all from me, is an exceptional journalist, non-fiction writer and poet, two of whose books I published later, one at Quadrant Editions, another at Cormorant Books. George Liang, whose English was limited, was a committed poet in the Chinese language. I met with him regularly to translate the poems of Li Bai and Du Fu, which we eventually published at Cormorant Books.
Q: What do you see as your biggest accomplishment while there? What had you been hoping to achieve?
A: I did not have big expectations when I took up the position as writer-in-residence at U. of A. I was honoured by the offer and grateful to have an income, but uncertain of academia as a possible future. My sense of self-worth was certainly heightened by the moral support from faculty and the enthusiasm of students. I also made a few enduring friendships and wrote a few good poems.
Perhaps my biggest accomplishment in Edmonton was coming to the gradual realization that I could combine teaching and writing and might have a modest success at both, but that I needed to settle down and give myself and my family the kind of stability I’d not had as a child, during which the family was quite peripatetic and I attended a dozen different schools. I came to understand, too, that my writing would suffer if I kept constantly on the move. Although this awareness came too late to accept the generous offer from the University of Alberta, when another came from Concordia University, I grabbed it.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Magie Dominic

Magie Dominic , Newfoundland writer and artist, received the Langston Hughes award for poetry and studied at The Art Institute of Pittsburgh. Her memoir, The Queen of Peace Room , from Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002, was shortlisted for the Canadian Women's Studies Award, Book of the Year Award- Autobiography with ForeWord Magazine, and the Judy Grahn Award. Her second book, Street Angel , from Wilfrid Laurier University Press, a sequel to The Queen of Peace Room, was published in 2014 and nominated for Book of the Year Award – Autobiography, with ForeWord Magazine.

She was long listed for the Vanderbilt/Exile Short Fiction Award. Her art has been shown in Toronto and New York, including an exhibition at the United Nations.

She is the recipient of five grants, is one of the founding members of the Off-Off Broadway movement of the sixties, and a member of The League of Canadian Poets.

Books co-authored include: H. M. Koutoukas Remembered by His Friends, 2010; Eco Poetry, The League of Canadian Poets, 2009; Belles Lettres/Beautiful Letters, The League of Canadian Poets, 1994.

Her writing and art archives were entered into NYU Fales Library Permanent Collection in New York. Her theater archives, The Caffe Cino/ Magie Dominic Archives, were acquired by Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts in 2011. Both collections are open to the public.

1 - How did your first book change your life?
The director of Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Brian Henderson, and the people at WLUP who read my manuscript for The Queen of Peace Room, were an unbelievable source of encouragement. Their vote of confidence in my work offered me permission, in my mind, to write what was a difficult and challenging book.

Upon publication, The Queen of Peace Room went on to be nominated for three awards.

The Queen of Peace Room addresses my own experiences with incest, violence, rape, and eventually and importantly – hope and faith. I don’t think I could have written either book, The Queen of Peace Room or the recent Street Angel, without Brian’s original encouragement. So that was of paramount importance in believing in my work.

How does your most recent work compare to your previous?
Street Angel, my most recent book, is a sequel to The Queen of Peace Room. The Queen of Peace Room is very much focused on the present time; on the story of an eight day retreat in an isolated retreat house and how my life unfolded over that eight day period. It delves into the details of that week with a group of Catholic nuns, and the unexpected occurrences. How that week unfolded is what the book, The Queen of Peace Room, portrays.

On the other hand, Street Angel begins with the voice of an eleven year old Newfoundland girl in the 1950’s. We see the world through my eyes at that time, - my mother’s hallucinations and violence, sadistic nuns, and a very important respite found in the radio, Hollywood movies, and the Newfoundland wilderness. Street Angel takes the reader from the 1940’s up to today and covers nearly three quarters of a century. I did a great deal of research for the book.

How does it feel different?
I still have the same anxieties when I write. Will it be any good? Will anyone want to read it?

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I began writing poetry when I was in school. I came from what the nuns, and by extension the Catholic Church, referred to as a “mixed home”. My father was Catholic and my mother was Presbyterian. This was like living in sin and required punishment, according to the nuns. Although they needed nothing to justify punishment. We were beaten with a leather strap. That’s referenced in Street Angel.

The “good children” – those not living in sin - got their stories displayed on the bulletin board.

I’m not certain, but I may have thought that if I wrote something short, like a poem, I had a better chance of getting my work recognized. Less space on the board. I don’t remember ever being recognized, but it could have been something that simple that resulted in my starting out as a poet. I did have a poem published in the high school newspaper during my last year in school. It was a poem about death. I’m not sure what that was all about. Once I graduated I didn’t have to think about the board anymore.

My poetry was very influenced by the anti-war movement of the 1960’s and the poets and writers of that era. This was after I moved to New York. I became involved with the anti-war movement, the Off-Off Broadway movement and writing and reading in coffee houses and churches and demonstrations, etc. Long answer to a short question.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project?
Every project is different. I am motivated by deadlines, so I try to give myself a deadline to serve as a focus point if I don’t have an actual one. There are times when I have an idea and it stays that way for a long time, just an idea lurking around in my mind. It becomes more of an image, rather than words. I’m also an artist so I have that medium to work with. Sometimes what I thought would be a poem or a story ends up being a collage.

Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process?
The ideas come quickly, but I can’t seem to write as fast as I think.

Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Both. There were instances in both The Queen of Peace Room and Street Angel when entire pages unfolded in one sitting. The pages simple wrote themselves, all I had to do was hold onto the pen. That doesn’t happen often, but what a gift when it does.

Then there are times when I’ll rewrite something a dozen times, over and over, and finally surrender and leave it for another time, or never.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
For me, writing is easier if it’s broken into small pieces. I write fragments at first, often a long list of phrases that are relevant to the poem or story. I don’t worry about the order. I just write the phrases as they come to me, then organize or delete. Free writing is the easiest way to get words on paper.

I wrote a long autobiographical poem in the mid 1990’s titled notes from the cover. It was first published in ARC quarterly in Ottawa. John Barton, the editor of Arc at the time, was instrumental in encouraging me to eventually transform the poem into a story. He said that I had to write the story of the poem.

notes from the cover was the most difficult piece I’d ever written. It represented more than a half century of struggles and conflicts and violence. Some were unpleasant, but a few were horrific. The poem was created from a long list of phrases. Like a list of things to do. In this case, moments to verbalize.

notes from the cover was the unexpected precursor to both The Queen of Peace Room and Street Angel. I had to write the poem before I could ever write the books. I don’t think it would ever have been the other way around. notes from the cover was the frame around both The Queen of Peace Room and Street Angel. The poem resulted from the long list of phrases. The books resulted from the poem.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy speaking in public and doing readings, but I still get a little bit nervous.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
We each carry a lifetime of memories around with us. We don’t leave the memories behind when we enter a room or walk outdoors. Memories are a part of our being, like skin and bones. That’s what Street Angel and The Queen of Peace Room are about. The memories.

By telling our own stories we inspire others to do likewise. And conversely when we read or hear the stories of others we may understand ourselves a little more.

I advise writers who are tackling difficult stories to write small pieces at first, and then read excerpts to a few supportive people. The sound of your own voice reading your own words is a powerful tool.

Allen Ginsberg told me that I had to read more. He said you can’t hear the poem on paper. If you want to understand it you have to read it out loud. I try to remember that.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Well, there is the writer, and there is the writer who is also the teacher of writing and both have an important role to play. Personally I love both - the role of being a writer, and the role of being a writing teacher. I love writing workshops and the energy that can be found there.

Example – I gave a writing workshop in Toronto at a shelter for at-risk youth. There was one First Nation teen who refused to write. He wasn’t disruptive, he simply refused to participate. At the end of the session, I gave each of the teens a pen and a notebook so they could continue their writing. When I offered the pen and notebook to the boy he refused it. He said his people didn’t write stories. They spoke their stories. And he said it defiantly. I told him that I understood that, but I also knew that his people understood the importance of symbols. I told him that the pen and the paper were a gift from me, but he didn’t have to use them. They were just symbols of stories and traditions. The ice melted and he began talking to the group about his very early years, his childhood experiences and his fears. He told his story in his own way, without pen and paper. That young boy had such an impact on me, I remember it in detail. I think I had an impact on him as well. Sometimes a person just needs a symbol.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
A little of both. It’s extremely important, but also frustrating when you’re trying to justify a comma or hyphen.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Three of equal importance:

Ginsberg telling me that I had to read out loud in order to fully understand my work.

Margaret Atwood in a statement she made in a 1995 lecture; “If you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography -- but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.” That gave me the green light to write Street Angel and The Queen of Peace Room and not worry about anyone’s judgement reguarding my own life as lived.

Joe Cino, one of the most creative and magical people I have ever had the privilege of knowing, and I write about him in both books, told me one time – “Don’t talk about what you’re going to do. Do it!” That’s a motivator.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to memoir)? What do you see as the appeal?
Writing poetry and writing memoir involve two different states of mind, for me. Very often a line in a poem, or the poem itself, will transform into as essay or part of a book. The poem notes from the cover, is a perfect example of that. The poem was the unexpected foundation for both Street Angel and The Queen of Peace Room.

Poetry, at times, can be freer. A poem is the story of one exquisite cloud at sunset; the memoir is the entire sky - something like that.

I like writing in both forms, but they’re very different experiences.

And to add to that I’m also a visual artist. I illustrated The Queen of Peace Room. And I did the cover art for both Street Angel and The Queen of Peace Room. I do a lot of collage work and in a way collage is exactly like writing. You assemble a collection of objects, paper and bark and felt and shiny objects for example, and then assemble the pieces into an image. A few pieces won’t work so you put them aside - much the same way one would create sentences, or edit a story. All the forms are related.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Generally my day begins the night before. Before going to sleep I make a list of what I have to do the next day - work, chores, appointments, travelling from point A to point B, etc. Then I figure out how many hours that will encompass and that tells me if I’ll have anything left for writing. I try to write every day, even for an hour.

So if I want to get any writing accomplished I have to get the chores done first, which means I may have to get up early. And that doesn’t always translate into going to sleep earlier. But it’s a choice, so you can’t complain. I write something every day, even it’s a list of things to write, or a letter, or reworking a difficult paragraph.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Windows. (Not to jump). I go to a window and hopefully I’ll be able to see a patch of sky and vegetation. I find great inspiration in the sky, in the activity there. In New York City a view of the sky isn’t always a given. In fact it’s not a given at all. But that’s the first thing I turn to. If I could step outdoors and walk on a quite shoreline every day – that would be paradise. I’m trying to get back to Newfoundland once a year. I was there in August. Some of the most beautiful landscapes and shorelines in the world exist there. I can retain that energy for months.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The forest in general, and coniferous trees in particular – pine and spruce. They remind me of when I used to walk in the woods alone as a child. That’s part of the story in Street Angel – the years of walking in the woods alone and the solace I found there. At one point, because of circumstances, we lived in an unheated cabin in the woods, without running water or electricity. I had an unusual childhood.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Definitely yes, all of it to some extent. But definitely nature, every aspect. I once went on a summer retreat for two weeks. It was a retreat house on a large section of land - several acres. There’d been a terrible storm during the winter. So there were dozens of shattered trees with broken limbs and ravaged trunks. Destruction was all over the place. Some people were walking around taking pictures of flowers, but I was taking pictures of shattered trees. I saw a portrait of humanity there I guess. Everything is inspiration. Science and music. For me, it’s definitely nature, and visual art.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I like a variety of writers – Margaret Atwood, Ondaatje, Frank McCourt, Ann Marie MacDonald, and Mary Oliver. And I like reading haiku – and how a story can be contained within three lines.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Learn to swim. Have my own one-room cabin somewhere on a shoreline.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I came to the United States to study Interior Design. I worked in that field for a few years, then discovered theater and worked in that field for decades. I would enjoy some aspects of interior design, but I can’t see myself getting utterly stressed out to the point of illness over a throw pillow. But regardless of what I ended up doing, I’m sure I’d be writing. I began to write when I was a child. Writing is part of me. I carry it with me.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
If you mean doing something else in the arts, it may have been because writing was easy to carry around, literally, as opposed to a piano or easel. I could put paper and pens in my pocket. As far as other forms of work go, I’ve worked at other things all my life. I worked as a dresser to opera singers at the Metropolitan Opera and New York City Opera and I worked as a dresser on Broadway and television. That job supported me for twenty five years. So in a way, I’ve done both all my life.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’ve just read Angela’s Ashes for the fourth or fifth time. It’s like a magnificent painting that I want to view again and again. And Deep Down Dark by Hector Tobar, the story of 33 coal miners who were trapped in a Chilean mine for 69 days, and all were rescued. It’s an incredible book, and an incredible story.

I saw two great films in 2014- The Theory of Everything about Stephen Hawking, and the Edward Snowden documentary - Citizenfour . I actually saw Citizenfour three times. There’s a point in the documentary where things move exceedingly fast and I wanted to understand how the events unraveled.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a manuscript that covers a window of time between 1960 and 1969. It will be a sequel to both Street Angel and The Queen of Peace Room. I touch on that ten year period in both books but I want to expand on the people I saw and the stories - the violence and creativity, the enormous joys and unbelievable tragedies. The amazing people I worked with and read with, and experienced - stage managing Bette Midler and working with Bernadette Peters. Poetry readings with Peter Orlovsky and Moondog and Allen Ginsberg. Encountering Andy Warhol. Working with Tom Eyen, Sam Shepherd, Lanford Wilson, Joe Cino and an endless list of people at a small caffe theater called The Caffe Cino. The Cino shaped who I am.

Those years for me were combined with the antiwar movement, with readings and peace demonstrations, civilrights marches, and political poetry. I was an impostor for the television show, To Tell the Truth. I received the Langston Hughes Award for poetry, and I saw people die on the street from heroin overdoses. Somewhere in there I worked for Air Canada and for an interior design showroom. I also worked at the Lighthouse for the Blind and worked with blind children.

It seems like complete science-fiction – except I have documentation. Anything was possible. A man walked on the moon! I’m writing about that decade and the people I knew, what I saw, and how I lived it. That’s what I’m working on.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Fred Wah, Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962-1991

I paint this broader picture, or rescaling, of Canadian literature because Fred Wah’s poetry, no matter how localized it is in the particulars of life, landscape, language, and perception, has also always been transnational and globalized; from the confluence of poetics across the Americas to Europe and Asia, to the content of the works themselves, with its configurations of a hybrid identity that fully develops through this volume (which leads to Wah’s groundbreaking book that refigured writing that engaged with the politics of identity – rather than the rather narrowly defined “identity politics” – Diamond Grill [1996]). The great subtlety of the poetry in Scree is in its expansiveness: a movement from a grounded localness that carries a weight in its details of place and in its precision of language, to syntactically compressed narratives that sweet from “my mountains” of British Columbia to “your [Wah’s father] China youth and the images of place for you before you were twenty are imbued with the green around Canton rice fields, humid Hong Kong masses” (“Elite 8,” Waiting for Saskatchewan, 67-68), Scree pulls together the early and unsure Tish poems and thirteen books, Lardeau (1965), Mountain (1967), Among(1972), Tree (1972), Earth (1974), Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (1975), Loki Is Buried at Smoky Creek (1980), Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh (1981), Owners Manual (1981), Grasp the Sparrow’s Tail (1982), Waiting for Saskatchewan (1985), Rooftops(1988), and So Far (1991) – and it does so in a manner that creates a movement that foregrounds the way in which themes and poetic forms (the relationship of form and content again!) are in dialogue throughout the book. After many readings of the gathered work, Fred and I decided to deviate from a chronology shaped by the book’s publication dates and instead we ordered Screeroughly according to the dates the poems were written with a particular eye to the shifts and development of poetic form. The dialogue between Fred Wah’s earlier works tests the possibilities of a poetics of place, of a syntactic dynamism opened by the North American postwar experiments in form and a push against the Western box of knowledge (a push that is threaded through 1960s counterculture up to the globalization of the early 1990s). The later works in Scree move away from the more open forms of the earlier works and combine Japanese poetic forms with the dense and materialistic use of language in order to approach the narratives of place, diaspora, and belonging that recur throughout the works in Scree. This relationship of the testing of poetic forms and the shifts, developments, and repetitions of themes cohere powerfully in “This Dendrite Map: Father/Mother Haibun” from the Governor General’s Award-winning Waiting for Saskatchewan and sets the ground for Diamond Grill. (Jeff Derksen, “Reader’s Manual: An Introduction to the Poetics and Contexts of Fred Wah’s Early Poetry”)
It is a bit overwhelming, joyously so, to think that the six hundred-plus pages of BC poet Fred Wah’s hefty Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962-1991 (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2015), edited by poet and critic Jeff Derksen, is only a selection from Wah’s first three decades of publishing. The book opens with poems published in Tish, and moves through thirteen books over a thirty year period, ending with a selection of his utaniki from So Far [see the short piece I wrote on So Far for Brick Books last year, here]. Still, the boundary line between what might be seen as “earlier” (which does presume a “later”) is a bit curious, and appears to be one of half-way; 1991 is roughly the half-way point between then and now. Given that at least one of the collections in this list, Waiting for Saskatchewan, has appeared in reissue, it wouldn’t be as an argument of which titles remain “in print” against those that do not.
Talonbooks has long been unique in Canadian publishing for their attention to publishing selecteds by Canadian poets, from the early series of selected paperbacks (eight in all) in 1980 by George Bowering, bill bissett, bpNichol, Daphne Marlatt, Roy Kiyooka, Frank Davey, Phyllis Webb and Wah, to the mid-career overviews of poets Sharon Thesen and Barry McKinnon, to these more recent omnibus collections, including Roy Kiyooka's Pacific Windows, The Collected Books of Artie Gold , Phyllis Webb’s Peacock Blue, and now, Fred Wah’s Scree. Edited by Derksen, with a hefty critical introduction by him as well, the book is gorgeous, and must have been a design nightmare, attempting to keep as close as possible the integrity of the original publications into a single volume. The resulting volume—shift of image, colour and font—is a breathtaking accomplishment that does far more than simply replicate a selection of thirty years of writing and publishing, but work to present some sense of what those early publications might have felt like in their original forms. The book also includes a selected bibliography, taken from the Fred Wah Digital Archive, but one that only goes up to 1991; whereas I understand that I could simply look up what he has produced since, the omission of such information is a curious decision (and one that hasn’t yet caught up to the small mound of reissued books that have appeared over the past decade or so).
Part of what has helped Wah become one of Canada’s most engaging poets has been in his ability to remain engaged in exploring how and why poems are constructed, from the breath of the line-break to the breath of his prose lines, as well as his inquiries into his “bio-text,” and larger questions of place and racial identity. What also becomes very clear through Wah’s Scree is his ongoing engagement with breath, gesture, pause and improvisation (something he discussed earlier last year in an interview posted at Jacket2), from the poem “WHEN,” from Lardeau, that writes “When it is hot / when in the afternoon / tomorrow / last night / today when / to expect / the way / to take / (of / the mind’s meadows / yes),” to the final page, from So Far:
            Out of the corner of my eye more rocks. And out an ear I hear a few birds sing their particular song, not solitary: the creeks rush and gurgle down to the valley below. In a corner of my mind is tomorrow’s two-and-a-half-hour hike out to the trailhead and then the long drive home. But nowhere else.

                        clear stingin’ peaks                                                   rock green moss                                                                                    campion                                       all surface news                                                                        inked                        to the bloated stone heroes                                       massed alongside Mao’s mausoleum                        same shards here                                                      within the square                                                                a “percolation                                                      network”                        five lines,                                        five soldiers a line                                                                duendestone                        thano-stone

dusie : the tuesday poem,

The Tuesday poem is nearly three years old, with one hundred and forty-three new poems and counting! Since April 9, 2013, I've been curating a weekly poem over at the dusie blog, an offshoot of the online poetry journal Dusie  (http://www.dusie.org/), edited/published by American poet and publisher Susana Gardner.
http://dusie.blogspot.ca/
The series aims to publish a mix of authors from the dusie kollektiv, as well as Canadian and international poets, ranging from emerging to the well established. Over the next few weeks and months, watch for new work by dusies and non-dusies alike, including Alice Burdick, Buck Downs, Phinder Dulai, Bronwen Tate, Ashley-Elizabeth Best, Nelson Ball, Laura Sims, Cassidy McFazdean, Paul Zits, Geoffrey Young, Michael Sikkema, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Emily Izsak, Michael Ruby, Kemeny Babineau, Mairéad Byrne, Amy Bagwell, Jamie Sharpe, Aaron Kreuter, Endi Bogue Hartigan, Claire Lacey, George Bowering, Muriel Leung, Michael Lithgow, Brynne Rebele-Henry, Sara Nicholson, Jennifer Baker and Kristina Drake.
A new poem will appear every Tuesday afternoon, Central European Summer Time, just after lunch (which is 8am in Central Canada terms).

If you wish to receive notices for poems as they appear, just send me an email at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com.
So far, the Tuesday poem series has featured new writing by Elizabeth Robinson, Megan Kaminski, Marcus McCann, Hoa Nguyen, Stephen Collis, j/j hastain, David W. McFadden, Edward Smallfield, Erín Moure, Roland Prevost, Maria Damon, Rae Armantrout, Jenna Butler, Cameron Anstee, Sarah Rosenthal, Kathryn MacLeod, Camille Martin, Pattie McCarthy, Stephen Brockwell, Rosmarie Waldrop, Nicole Markotić, Deborah Poe, Ken Belford, Hugh Thomas, nathan dueck, Hailey Higdon, Stephanie Bolster, Jessica Smith, Mark Cochrane, Amanda Earl, Robert Swereda, Colin Smith, Sarah Mangold, Joe Blades, Maxine Chernoff, Peter Jaeger, Dennis Cooley, Louise Bak, Phil Hall, Fenn Stewart, derek beaulieu, Susan Briante, Adeena Karasick, Marthe Reed, Brecken Hancock, Lea Graham, D.G. Jones, Monty Reid, Karen Mac Cormack, Elizabeth Willis, Susan Elmslie, Paul Vermeersch, Susan M. Schultz, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, K.I. Press, Méira Cook, Rachel Moritz, Kemeny Babineau, Gil McElroy, Geoffrey Nutter, Lisa Samuels, Dan Thomas-Glass, Judith Copithorne, Deborah Meadows, Meredith Quartermain, William Allegrezza, nikki reimer, Hillary Gravendyck, Catherine Wagner,Stan Rogal, Sarah de Leeuw, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Arielle Greenberg, lary timewell, Norma Cole, Paul Hoover, Emily Carr, Kate Schapira, Johanna Skibsrud, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, David McGimpsey,Richard Froude, Marilyn Irwin, Carrie Olivia Adams, Aaron Tucker, Mercedes Eng, Jean Donnelly, Pearl Pirie, Valerie Coulton, Lesley Yalen, Andy Weaver, Christine Stewart, Susan Lewis, Kate Greenstreet, ryan fitzpatrick, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Lina ramona Vitkauskas, Nikki Sheppy, N.W. Lea, Barbara Henning, Chus Pato (trans Erín Moure), Stephen Cain, Lucy Ives, William Hawkins, Jan Zwicky, Rusty Morrison, Jon Boisvert, Helen Hajnoczky, Steven Heighton, Jennifer Kronovet, Ray Hsu, Steve McOrmond, Lily Brown, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Beth Bachmann, Harold Abramowitz, Sarah Burgoyne, David James Brock, Elizabeth Treadwell, Shannon Maguire, Mary Austin Speaker, Victor Coleman, Charles Bernstein, Jennifer K Dick, Eric Schmaltz, Kayla Czaga, Paige Taggart, Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Lillian Necakov, Liz Howard, Jamie Reid, Jennifer Londry, Rachel Loden, a rawlings, Jenny Haysom, Jake Kennedy, Beverly Dahlen, Kristjana Gunnars, Eleni Zisimatos, Pete Smith, Julie Carr and Natalee Caple and Anne Boyer.